


Graves

by Literary



Series: Rewritten [1]
Category: Fire Emblem Series, Fire Emblem: Kakusei | Fire Emblem: Awakening
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-12
Updated: 2017-02-12
Packaged: 2018-09-23 16:15:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,308
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9665150
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Literary/pseuds/Literary
Summary: Gerome believes in graves.





	

**Author's Note:**

> This is a rewrite of a 'fic written in October of 2013. Criticism I received on the original was taken into account with this rewrite, so hopefully it works better than it did before. I really couldn't figure out a better way to format this; blockquotes looked weird, indenting looked off, extra spaces made it hard to read, and right-side aligning was eye-bleedingly bad. If you have any suggestions on how I could fix the formatting, please share!

Gerome believes in graves—in having them and in visiting them:  
a great rock to mark the location and flowers to pretty it up,  
like his mother used to pretty up the house when his father brought her an armful of tulips  
and said something sappy like, “You’re as pretty now  
as you were the day I proposed.”

His memories of his parents are few and scattered on the wind like the leaves in autumn. He sees them as if through a broken window: his father’s broad chest with pale scars cutting across it and the way his mother takes her tea: exactly two teaspoons of sugar in each cup; no cream.

The only _grave_ thing in the past is his face, they say.  
Lucina worries that the lines in his forehead make him look old,  
and Inigo teases him about how serious he looks with his lips turned down,  
but Gerome _is_ serious, and he _feels_ old—and really, he’s no different than they are.  
Gerome is the one who wears the mask to cover his face,  
But they have masks of their own:  
Inigo his smile, and Lucina the word _father._

His mother taught him to sew. His father taught him to love. Both taught him to fight and that is what has gotten him this far. The heft of a weapon in his hand, adrenaline pushing through his veins, sweat on his skin, the terrifying ability to focus on nothing but the blood pumping through his veins… Fighting is survival is life is existence.

The fall almost killed her—his mother.  
Both legs were broken and her head split open.  
His father nearly died from the fear of finding her; his mother nearly died.

Minerva won’t fly very high anymore with a rider on her back and she doesn’t like it when Cherche—not mother; just Cherche—goes too far above the treeline. Maybe she remembers the broken form of her dearest friend against the field; maybe it haunts her like it had haunted Gerome to see his mother in bed for months afterward…first from her injuries and then from the headaches.

It was when Minerva returned to him that he knew.  
Wyverns attached themselves not to bodies, but spirits.  
His parents were gone, the both of them: heroes, surely, but dead heroes,  
and it was hard to be grateful for their bravery when they had left him all alone.

Crying was worthless but he was too young to know better, and he cried into Minerva’s scaly hide for hours until he exhausted himself. It hurt to wake up the next morning alone, hurt to know that he would always be that way, but his parents had taught him never to give up, and he could not do to Minerva what they had done to him—and leave her alone, too.

_Here lies—_ is how the gravestone should read, but  
there is no grave and there are no bodies and he feels empty without it,  
without closure,  
without something tangible to reassure him that the memories are not imagined  
but real and never truly forgotten.  
  
Gerome digs a hole—the best he can do, the best any ten-year-old can manage with skinny little arms and minimal experience using a shovel. And when the hole is done, as deep as he can make it and nearly as wide, he goes into the house. His tongue pokes out of his mouth as he wraps his parents’ things in his mother’s hand-sewn doilies and packs them away in a wooden crate.

The letters from his father,  
“To my pretty bride”   
Even when she was not so pretty anymore after the fall.  
His mother’s favorite teacup—a chip in the handle;  
she said Duke Virion of Rosanne sent it as a wedding gift.  
Hair ribbons and razors, perfume, cologne, everything that reminded him of them.  
He wrapped them all up in the baby quilt his mother had sewn from his father’s old clothes.  
A way to keep them warm—or maybe just the memory of them.

He shook the dirt out of his messy blond hair and bathed in the creek because nobody could tell him it was dangerous or untidy anymore. The sun was cold and he wondered what he would do when the snow started falling. Had it hurt Exalt Lucina this much to lose her own parents? Yes, he thought, shivering in the creek. It probably had. But the question he couldn’t ask, and didn’t want answered, was: _Does it still?_

He returned to the house naked and put on a pair of his father’s trousers,  
pulled his mother’s soft pink robe around him,  
and wrapped himself in the blankets on their bed  
just to smell them for a while,  
Just to pretend that everything would be okay.

In the spring he planted flowers over the place where he had buried their things. It was strange to walk into the kitchen and not hear, “Gerome, honey, you’d better not be tracking mud into my clean house, do you hear me?”

Still, he scraped his boots at the door as he’d been taught  
and kept the floors clean. He scrubbed like his mother and  
worked like his father and  
tried to pretend that everything was normal.

His only regret in leaving the future is leaving that grave behind, for it _is_ a grave, little pieces and reminders of his parents buried there. And when he’s in the past, he can’t bear to look at Cherche’s tea set, given to her by Duke Virion of Rosanne, because it looks too much like the one buried in the future—the favorite teacup with the chip by the handle.

Lucina doesn’t shake her head at him when she catches him in the backyard  
planting tulips with his hair falling in his face and dirt under his fingernails.  
She doesn’t say, “Are you crazy?”  
She doesn’t say, “Cherche is your mother, you know.”  
She doesn’t say, “What’s the matter with you, Gerome?”  
She just knees next to him, an understanding in her eyes that   
makes his chest ache and says, softly,  
“May I help?”

She tells him that she misses her real parents, and for the first time he realizes that she is not at all naïve—not even a little. Perhaps none of them really are. She calls Chrom “Father” but she knows he’s not her father, not _her_ father, not the man who raised her and taught her and loved her and died for her. In moments like this, he admires her, wishes for the kind of strength she possesses, the bit of peace that she’s managed to hold onto through the chaos. Gerome can’t call the Vaike and Cherche of the past _father_ and _mother_ ; they are to him special endearments. They mean too much to speak aloud.

He lost them once.  
He doesn’t think he can go through it again.  
He’s older, now, and wiser, and stronger in so many ways,  
but sometimes he dreams of Cherche’s Minerva returning to him,  
a mournful cry splitting the air,  
and he wakes up choking on fear that he knows is misplaced   
because she is not his mother  
and he should not care what happens to her.

Despite his misgivings he feels fortunate for many things: to have Lucina with him, to see what his parents were like even before he was born, to have the chance to live in a time like this—where Minerva is not alone and _he_ is not alone and there is still, for all of them, a future.

“I know this seems silly,” he tries to say,  
but Lucina stops him with a shake of her head  
and her dirty fingers slipping through his.  
“Can we plant lilacs, too?” she asks, and leans her head against his shoulder.  
“My mother, she loved lilacs.”


End file.
